And hysperia, isn’t the world essentially and always divided into people with different interests? (Historiann is a Marxist, but isn’t that what politics is, the negotiation of a governing consensus among different competing interest groups?) I don’t see “identity politics” as more divisive than any other kinds of politics–it’s just that most of us (those who don’t have lots of money or connections to Wall Street, K Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue) have only our identities to bring us together with other likeminded people. And, suggesting that “identity politics” are somehow more divisive than other kinds of politics seems to be part of a move to exclude people with certain identities from politics entirely.

Socialism would be great, if only it (like capitalism) didn’t rely on the unpaid labor of women in all of its previous historical incarnations. This is why I’m something of a Women’s Libber-tarian. Women are rational economic actors who should have the right to work and sell their labor at the highest price without being accused of the downfall of Western Civilization.

I’m still struggling to find what I think the uniting factor might be and trying to go beyond materialism and economic inequality, as those takes on the world don’t seem to have borne fruit. I still find socialist arguments pretty compelling, as long as we don’t overestimate the economic. If poverty and lack of access to resources – economic, social, cultural and political – aren’t the things that are common to people oppressed for a variety of other reasons, I don’t know what the unifying factors might be.

Also, something in this communitarian idea reminds me very much of these liberal (and even some self-professed radical) males who constantly want to shove feminist issues to the side as distracting from the “real issues.” As if the concerns of half of the population are not “real”!